F PMull-F Head First I- LeR A n E C g P Exth PrE a a c m ti Agile I c nse i d e A Brain-Friendly Guide A Learner’s Companion to Understanding Agile and Passing the PMI-ACP® Exam Load agile concepts right into your brain Learn how Scrum Boss your code helped Amy keep her around with XP users thrilled Explore how task boards keep everybody Unravel the mysteries on track of Lean and Kanban Andrew Stellman & Jennifer Greene Elisabeth Robson & Eric Freeman Praise for Head First Agile “Working on a great agile team can feel magical. Problems, personality conflicts, and project politics fall away through the emphasis and focus on delivering something, learning, and delivering again. But creating such magical teams is hard. It just got easier. Head First Agile is the book many of us have been waiting for. A perfect blend of practical advice, supported by the principles of Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Kanban, Head First Agile can help anyone create a great, magical, agile team.” — Mike Cohn, Author of Succeeding with Agile, Agile Estimating and Planning, and User Stories Applied “If you’ve ever worked in a software team, you will immediately relate to the accurate and insightful case studies in Head First Agile. There’s plenty of great advice here that I wish someone had told me earlier in my career. But regardless of how long you’ve been in the software field, you’re guaranteed to find things to learn and new ways of looking at old problems. It was a surprise to me to learn how much more there is to XP than just Pair Programming—and I’m definitely going to be looking at how my team can benefit from these practices and ideas.” — Adam Reeve, Principal Architect at RedOwl Analytics “Head First Agile is written in such an easy to digest manner that I found it difficult to put down. Since the book is written as an interaction between people, instead of just providing facts, I feel I have a much better understanding of both the principles and practices of Agile.” — Patrick Cannon, Senior Program Manager, Dell “Head First Agile thoroughly explains some very challenging Agile concepts to successfully pass the PMI- ACP exam and re-enforces these concepts with meaningful exercises, real-life stories, and brain-teasing visuals for greater learning retention. The unique format of this book caters to all learning styles and anyone from beginner to expert will benefit from studying this book. Thank you, Andrew and Jennifer, for writing another outstanding Head First book!” — John Steenis, PMP, CSM, CSPO “Head First Agile is great! I love how the authors are able to explain the subject matter in a fun, easy to read and understand format. Kudos to Andrew and Jennifer for a job well done!” — Mark Andrew Bond, Network Operations Project Manager at a higher education institution “Members of any software development team, in any capacity, Agile based or not, should read this Head First Agile. Teams that have adopted Agile in “whole” or part will better understand how to improve their processes. Teams that are not using Agile can really learn what it takes to start the journey to Agile. For me, this book was a good reflection on projects that succeeded and failed over the last 20 years of my career.” — Dan Faltyn, Chief Security Officer, BlueMatrix “Agile has been a buzz word in the industry, which many people talk about and use but without fully understanding the underlying principles and values behind the practices. Head First Agile helps demystify the topic and provides a superb guide into the Agile journey and mindset.” — Philip Cheung, Software Developer Praise for Head First Agile “I am a Project Manager who used Head First PMP to obtain my PMP last year. Head First Agile follows the same concept as Head First PMP... visual thinking and learning to understand, comprehend, and retain the concepts. In a market where quality books for preparation are limited, this was a great resource to have and use for PMI- ACP exam prep. The practice exam questions and Chapter 7 (including Domain Reviews) were really good preparation. The whole thing went great, and I passed on my first try!” — Kelly D. Marce, Project Manager at a financial services firm “Head First Agile shows you that Agile is not a single methodology, but a range of approaches and ways of thinking about the development lifecycle. This book will guide you to find the method that best fits the needs of your team, and to understand how to continually improve over time. Approaches like Kanban, where you establish a pull system by visualizing the workflow and limiting work in progress, can be particularly empowering for teams.” — Nick Lai, Senior Engineering Manager at Uber Technologies “What better way to learn about an innovative way to approach work, Agile, than through this ingenious, creative, and ground-breaking approach to learning that engages the whole mind, emotions, and different learning styles. Chuck the boring text books of the past and pick up Head First Agile for a contemporary and intriguing learning experience.” — Tess Thompson, MS, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSP Agile Transformation Coach and Professor at Saint Mary’s University “Agile can be a very challenging topic for any PM who is schooled in traditional ways of working. The authors of this book have taken great care to make the topics accessible and they’ve presented the information in a straightforward, concise way that offers not just valuable information you need to be successful at the PMI-ACP exam, but more importantly information you need to be successful in applying Agile in a practical setting.” — Dave Prior, Certified Scrum Trainer, PMP, PMI-ACP at LeadingAgile “Head First Agile thoroughly explores practical problems and solutions using a wide array of techniques from the Agile playbook. The authors adeptly explain different types of Agile approaches, providing a great repository of Agile resources to the reader.” — Keith Conant, Senior Software Engineer at a payments company “Head First Agile is a great resource because it teaches people not only the practices and methods of Agile, but more importantly the mindset change. This book is based upon the values and principles outlined in the Agile Manifesto. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn about Agile delivery.” — Mike MacIsaac, Scrum Master, MBA, PMP, CSM “I am a certified Agile coach at IBM, where I teach and coach people from my organization helping them become Agile. I found Head First Agile to be a great addition to the Agile bookshelves, as well as a wonderful resource to complement the studies of those professionals preparing for the PMI-ACP exam” — Renato Barbieri, PMP, PMI-ACP, Manager, Agile coach, Kepner-Tregoe Program Leader at IBM Praise for other Head First books “With Head First C#, Andrew and Jenny have presented an excellent tutorial on learning C#. It is very approachable while covering a great amount of detail in a unique style. If you’ve been turned off by more conventional books on C#, you’ll love this one.” — Jay Hilyard, software developer, coauthor of C# 3.0 Cookbook “Going through this Head First C# book was a great experience. I have not come across a book series which actually teaches you so well…This is a book I would definitely recommend to people wanting to learn C#” — Krishna Pala, MCP “Head First Web Design really demystifies the web design process and makes it possible for any web programmer to give it a try. For a web developer who has not taken web design classes, Head First Web Design confirmed and clarified a lot of theory and best practices that seem to be just assumed in this industry.” — Ashley Doughty, senior web developer “Building websites has definitely become more than just writing code. Head First Web Design shows you what you need to know to give your users an appealing and satisfying experience. Another great Head First book!” — Sarah Collings, user experience software engineer “Head First Networking takes network concepts that are sometimes too esoteric and abstract even for highly technical people to understand without difficulty and makes them very concrete and approachable. Well done.” — J onathan Moore, owner, Forerunner Design “The big picture is what is often lost in information technology how-to books. Head First Networking keeps the focus on the real world, distilling knowledge from experience and presenting it in byte-size packets for the IT novitiate. The combination of explanations with real-world problems to solve makes this an excellent learning tool.” — R ohn Wood, senior research systems analyst, University of Montana Other related books from O’Reilly Learning Agile Beautiful Teams Head First PMP® Applied Software Project Management Making Things Happen Practical Development Environments Process Improvement Essentials Other books in O’Reilly’s Head First series Head First PMP Head First C# Head First Java Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOA&D) Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML Head First Design Patterns Head First Servlets and JSP Head First EJB Head First SQL Head First Software Development Head First JavaScript Head First Physics Head First Statistics Head First Ajax Head First Rails Head First Algebra Head First PHP & MySQL Head First Web Design Head First Networking Head First Agile Wouldn’t it be dreamy if there were a book to help me learn about agile that was more fun than going to the dentist? It’s probably nothing but a fantasy… Andrew Stellman Jennifer Greene Boston Head First Agile by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene Copyright © 2017 Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly Media books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://oreilly.com/safari). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or [email protected]. Series Creators: Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates Editor: Nan Barber Design Editor: Louise Barr Cover Designers: Karen Montgomery, Louise Barr Production Editors: Melanie Yarbrough Indexer: Lucie Haskins Proofreader: Jasmine Kwityn In Our Hearts Forever: Quentin the whippet and Tequila the pomeranian Printing History: September 2017: First Edition. The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The Head First series designations, Head First Agile, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. PMI-ACP, PMP, and PMBOK are registered marks of Project Management Institute, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc., was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and the authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. ISBN: 978-1-449-31433-0 [M] For Nisha and Lisa the authors Thanks for buying our book! We really love …because we know writing about this stuff, and you’re going to do we hope you get a kick out of great work with reading it… agile! Andrew Jenny Photo by Nisha Sondhe Andrew Stellman is a developer, architect, speaker, trainer, agile coach, project manager, and expert in building better software. Andrew is an author and international speaker, with top-selling books in software development and project management, and world-recognized Jennifer Greene is an enterprise expert in transforming and improving agile transformation leader, an agile coach, software organizations, teams, and code. He development manager, project manager, speaker, has architected and built large-scale software and authority on software engineering practices systems, managed large international software and principles. She’s been building software teams, and consulted for companies, schools, and for over 20 years in many different domains, corporations, including Microsoft, the National including media, finance, and IT consulting. She’s Bureau of Economic Research, Bank of America, led large-scale agile adoption efforts supporting Notre Dame, and MIT. Andrew’s had the development teams around the world and helped privilege of working with some pretty amazing individual team members get the most out of programmers during that time, and likes to think agile practices. She looks forward to continuing to that he’s learned a few things from them. work with talented teams solving interesting and difficult problems. Jfiofnenio rneu2sn,rt y0tH mh0ea aen5bdtd.o oTiFAnkh in,r 1edBs9ytr9e e pa8wCuu. #bthTliaif,sh vhubeeleio drbTt eehftea ihnrimne s stibr2,u bi0wflodai0orisnsk7 tg,r. eAsbBloepoofapotstkliehw ed idanb r ionSteo hok2aefsn 0 tdHhw0 aewava9rerd, e i tfg FioPoninlrrgleoos twjaoe benscdoe tu tr tboiMey sst ,aot hnHfhiaretegdawired a ma rfnFeeidfn ier,tt nssh,tg o,w i onLPaneMs,ee arfpPirounnu,bg irla nittsnghhod e gA edetgdt hibihlteeyeiir, or O n isnss’e iR.n c2eTco0ienlhl d1yet4 ihr.e y TAa hnredey a wlflyho eufnna dtsechdien yaS’trtiene glnl mostaonf b t&uw ilaGdrriene gep nrseoo fjCetcowtna srfuelot roi nrsgc wiienrn itt2iis0ntg0s b3sto—outkdshy,e intirgh efhyier rdsbtoi c paidr oleoj teec xtopf oa sssu praee a ckinoin nVgsu ielatttin ncagom nc fovemertpeeanrncayen sws .aa nsd meetings of software engineers, architects, and project managers. Check out their website, Building Better Software, at http://www.stellman-greene.com. viii